LECTURES DELIVERED IN THE DIVINITY SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF DUBLINBY GEORGE SALMON, D.D.PROVOST OF TRINITY COLLEGE, DUBLINAND REGIUS PROFESSOR OF DIVINITY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF DUBLIN

Lecture 14

THE BLUNDERS OF THE INFALLIBLE GUIDE.

I HAVE thought it well to let you see how the theory of an infallible Church works in practice. In the former Lectures I have given proof enough that in a number of cases the guide who asks us to follow him prefers himself to follow, and shows by his hesitations that he is ignorant of the true path. I will now add some cases where he has actually struck into wrong paths, and has been compelled, with very lame apologies, to retrace his steps. I reserve the question whether Popes ever have been heretics until I come to speak of that theory which ascribes infallibility to the Pope personally. One instance, however, in which a Pope was compelled to retire with disgrace, after having attempted to thrust his infallibility into a sphere in which it failed to secure correctness, is the department of Biblical criticism.

The Council of Trent having stamped the Vulgate as ‘authentic,’ ordered that a correct edition of this authorized Vulgate should be published. But little was done in fulfilment of this decree for nearly forty years, when the task was undertaken by Pope Sixtus V., a Pontiff who seems really to have believed in his own infallibility. He employed a Board of learned men to act as revisers, but in complete subordination to himself.

In his preface he claims the superiority to them which he exercised, as resulting from the singular privilege which he enjoyed as successor to Peter, the Prince of the Apostles, for whom Christ prayed that his faith should not fail, and who was charged to confirm the other Apostles in the faith. Accordingly, he tells with complacency of the labour which, among all his other apostolic cares, he had spent on this work, day after day, and for several hours each day, reading the collections and opinions of others, and balancing the reasons for the various readings; the plan of the work being, that while his learned revisers collected the evidence, it was for him alone to decide on the validity of their arguments, and determine by his absolute judgment what reading was to be preferred to what. When the work was printed he examined each sheet with the utmost care, and corrected the press with his own hand. The edition appeared in 1590, with a Constitution prefixed, in which Sixtus affirmed the plenary authority of the edition for all future time (‘ hac nostra perpetuo valitura constitutione ‘). ‘ By the fulness of apostolic power,’ he says, ‘ we decree and declare that this edition approved by the authority delivered to us by the Lord, is to be received and held as true, lawful, authentic, and unquestioned, in all public and private discussion, reading, preaching, and explanations.’ He forbids the printing of this Bible for the space of ten years at any press but his own in the Vatican. After that time it might be printed elsewhere, but only from one of the Vatican copies. He forbade expressly the publication of various readings in copies of the Vulgate, and pronounced that all readings in other editions and manuscripts, which might vary from those of this Sixtine edition, should have no credit or authority for the future. It was forbidden to alter the version in the smallest particle; and any person who should violate this Constitution, it was declared, would incur the indignation of Almighty God, and of His blessed Apostles Peter and Paul; and was threatened with the greater excommunication, not to be absolved except by the Pope himself. This was the language of a man who really believed in his infallibility. But a glance at the volume was sufficient to convince any moderately learned man of the folly, not to say impiety, of such boastful presumption. Many passages were found covered with slips of paper on which new corrections had been printed; others were scratched out and merely corrected with a pen; and different copies were corrected in different ways. A closer examination showed those competent to judge that the edition had graver faults than could be accounted for by printers’ carelessness. Sixtus had changed the readings of those whom he had employed to report upon the text with the most arbitrary and unskilful hand; and it was scarcely an exaggeration to say with Bellarmine that his precipitate self-reliance had brought the Church into the most serious peril. The death of Sixtus removed all constraint, and the learned divines whose opinions had been overruled represented the true state of the case to his successor. There was then much embarrassment how to correct these undeniable errors; and some men of weight advised the Pope to prohibit the use of the faulty books. But Bellarmine counselled that the credit of Sixtus should be saved; thereby, as he says in his autobiography, returning good for evil; for Sixtus, for a reason of which I may speak later, had put Bellarmine’s Controversiæ on the Index of prohibited books, ‘donec corrigerentur.’ Bellarmine’s way of solving the difficulty was to lay the blame upon the printers,1 although in his autobiography he makes no secret that those errors had been deliberately introduced by Sixtus himself, which he recommended should be imputed to the carelessness of others. Indeed Bellarmine’s original proposal was a delightful illustration of the skill which the Order to which he belonged is popularly believed to possess, in knowing how to insinuate a falsehood in words consistent with truth. He recommended that the faulty readings should be said to have occurred ‘præfestinatione vel tvpographorum vel aliorum’—either the printers were to blame or somebody else. However, this evasion was disdained in the preface to the new edition, written by Bellarmine himself, and still printed with the Roman Vulgate. No mention is made of ‘ somebody else,’ and the errors are said to have occurred ‘praelivitio.’ The preface tells that when the work had been printed, and when Pope Sixtus was going to publish it (implying that he had not published it2), perceiving that several errors of the press had crept in, he determined to have the whole work placed anew on the anvil. But that Sixtus really had any such intention is a statement for which there is no shadow of proof, and no probability. The edition of Clement, also published as authentic, differed from that of Sixtus in more than two thousand places. A list of these is given in the work of Dr. James, a former learned librarian of the Bodleian, called Bellum Papale, or Concordia Discors. And it became evident that the work of editing the Bible required patience, learning, critical sagacity, and that this was a work to which ‘infallibility’ was unequal. We owe it to the wilfulness of Sixtus that this was so soon found out. If he had been content to follow the opinions of the experts whom he had consulted, no doubt his edition would have appeared without opposition, and the Constitution prefixed, in which Sixtus had plainly claimed for his text the guarantee of infallibility, would have been a great obstacle to its emendation by later criticism.